


ouroboros

by thepensword



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: End!Georgie, End!Gerry, Fix-It, Gen, Resurrection, except for georgie gerry and the admiral everyone's kind of only briefly there, i don't have an excuse for this it's very self indulgent, oh this is rated g but georgie says the f bomb a lot so watch out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:35:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22117981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepensword/pseuds/thepensword
Summary: On a rooftop in central London, Gerard Keay opens long-dead eyes and takes his first breath in years.
Relationships: Georgie Barker & Gerard Keay, Georgie Barker & Jonathan Sims, background georgie/melanie and background jon/martin
Comments: 20
Kudos: 226





	ouroboros

**Author's Note:**

> idk man i was relistening to mag 111 and gerry said something like "dying's not so bad. it's staying dead that sucks" and i went huh that's kind of end-ish and then i went huh georgie and gerry should be friends and then it kind of spiraled out of control so here we are i guess

Georgie finds the ashes in a box beneath Jon’s desk. 

He is in a coma, still. She thinks that she’d be afraid for him, if fear was something she could still feel, but as it is it’s just sad. Melanie lets her into the archives without a word, but takes her hand and squeezes it once. There’s warmth there, Georgie thinks. It’s good.

The office is eery-quiet. A tape clicks on when she walks in, and she frowns in the direction of the humming. “Go away,” she says, and doesn’t know if it listens.

She sits in his chair, at his desk, and closes her eyes. She stays there for a while. The shadows in this room are dark and thick, full of dust and other people’s nightmares. It’s suffocating in here, and all too big at the same time. No wonder Jon’s eyes are so haunted.

Were. 

_Are._

Georgie thinks of a classroom full of the stillness of graves. She thinks of an empty gaze and the murmuring voice in her ear: _the moment you die will be the same as this one._ This moment sucks, actually, she decides. The moment she dies had _better_ not be like this. Hopefully she won’t be alone for it. Maybe Melanie will be there, warm hand in hers.

 _The moment you die. The moment_ he _die(s)(d)._

“Fuck off,” Georgie says aloud, and starts opening desk drawers. She’s not sure what she’s looking for; photographs, maybe? Scribbled notes? Some fragment of Jon left behind, perhaps, some lifeline to bring him home? She thinks that she might be angry. With him, for him. Will he even be himself, when he wakes up, or will his voice be drowned out by the hum of the tape recorder and the blink of too many eyes?

“I said, _fuck—_ ” 

Her fingers find the corner of the box, and she stills. The metal is cold to the touch—too cold. Cold like that classroom, like the whispered words in her ear, like Jon’s hand lying limp on the hospital bed. She knows immediately what it is without having to open it.

Ashes.

She sits there for a long moment, thinking. No, not really thinking, just...holding it. Looking at it. There’s someone in here, she thinks. There’s an ending. The moment he died...it didn’t stick. And then...then it did?

That’s boring.

(Later, she’ll try to convince herself it’s all part of her fascination with ghosts; she does run a podcast about it, after all. But she’ll know, even then, that that isn’t it. It’s the dead eyes, the whispered voice, and the cold. 

Georgie finds she doesn’t mind the cold.)

* * *

On a digital canvas, lines are erased, but one press of an arrow brings them right back. Nothing is permanent, just as everything is permanent. Entropy is the destruction of things, but in turn it causes increased collisions and new life. Everything is nothing. Nothing is everything. The moment you die will be the same as this one, so where do you draw the line?

Georgie Barker stands on the deserted roof of her building and opens a box. She’s not sure why she does so, but it feels right, just as what happens next feels right. It’s...peaceful, she thinks, the cold of the wind and the nothing of the night around her. It’s still.

“The moment you die,” she says as the ashes lift up into the wind, “was the same as this one. So, this moment now is the same as when you lived before. Nothing is everything, and everything is nothing, and the book is burnt and gone. New stars are born from the dying breaths of long-dead giants. What is an end without a beginning?”

On a rooftop in central London, Gerard Keay opens long-dead eyes and takes his first breath in years.

* * *

“Am I dead?” says Gerry, later. He’s on a worn couch, wrapped in a blanket, and there’s a cat in his lap. His skin is ice-cold, and his veins feel hollow and frozen, but the blanket does nothing to help. He thinks maybe he’ll always feel icy like this. The thought, strangely, doesn’t scare him.

He used to be scared all the time, is the thing. With his mother, hunting monsters in a world too big and too dark, and then when he got older. Scared of what could get him. Scared of being trapped forever. Scared, later, of being caught and trapped again. 

Scared of dying.

But...he did that. He died. And that wasn’t the bad part. The bad part was the after, the not-death, the crisp paper lungs and the constant smell of leather and ink. It had hurt, then, being in between. Then the burning, and the nothing, and that had been better. If life is white, and death is black, Gerry thinks he most hates the grey.

“I don’t know,” says the woman. Her name is Georgie. She has curly dark hair and warm chocolate eyes, and she’s not an Avatar. Not quite. But the End has its fingers all over her, just as it does him. “You were, before, I think. Jon burned you.”

“And you brought me back?” asks Gerry, voice quiet. He thinks he should resent her for that, but there’s not really much difference. Funny, he’d been so afraid to die, but death had been the same as this. Ouroboros. The cycle of all things.

The cat stretches in his lap. He thinks she’d called it the Admiral. Gerry had never considered himself a cat person, but the weight and softness in his lap is...reassuring. Grounding. He scritches his fingers under the Admiral’s chin and the cat thrums softly, claws gently starfishing into his thigh. 

“Yeah,” says Georgie. “I guess I did.”

“Why?”

She sighs. She looks like a strong woman, but a tired one. Gerry can understand that. Both Gertrude and his mother were much the same way—fearless. Georgie wears it differently, though. Less of the...unhinged madwoman thing. There’s a kindness in her face, a world-weary care for the people around her. Endings are beginnings, thinks Gerry, and he thinks that Georgie knows it too. “I don’t know,” she says. 

“What happens now?”

“Now,” says Georgie, and stands, “I make tea, and then I go to sleep. It’s past midnight, and I’m tired. You’re welcome to stay here. The bathroom is over there, if you need it, and there are more blankets in that closet. And then tomorrow we’ll figure out what’s next. I have a friend to try and save.”

“This friend of yours wouldn’t happen to be an Archivist, would he?”

“Yeah,” smiles Georgie. “As a matter of fact, he is.”

* * *

There’s a ghost in the prison hallways. He’s free of fear and tired of other Avatars trying to break the world. He stops at a doorway, and walks in as if the lock wasn’t even there.

“Mister Keay,” drawls a voice, low and smug and carefully unsurprised. “You’re supposed to have died.”

“Mm,” says the ghost. “Well, I got better.”

There are two ghosts, in that room, and one of them has too many eyes. Jonah Magnus opens his mouth to say something else, and promptly gets punched in the face.

“I think you’ve done enough talking,” says Gerry, and punches him again.

* * *

An end is just a beginning. Reboot to fix the problem. Retrace your steps, and maybe do it better this time.

Gerry Keay isn’t dead, or perhaps he is. His skin is too cold, and his hair has gone white, no matter how many times he tries to dye it. His eyes are changed too, all color leached away and placed with the glossy gaze of a corpse. He’s dead, and he breathes.

Gerry Keay is a ghost, and he’s sitting on a couch with a cat in his lap. His heart is pounding very fast for someone who’s supposed to be dead. “Goddamnit,” he curses through gritted teeth, eyes locked on the screen.

Yoshi crosses the finish line in first place, and Georgie slumps back against the couch with a grin. “Eat shit, Gerry,” she says. 

Gerry curses and drops his controller. “Okay, I fold,” he says. “You weren’t kidding when you said she was undefeated, huh?”

“I did warn you,” mutters Jonathan Sims, Archivist, Avatar of the Eye, from where he’s currently slumped on the armchair to Gerry’s right, almost entirely in Martin’s lap and face pressed into his shoulder. The two of them look happy, like that, but god are they insufferable sometimes. “She’s terrifying. Unbeatable.”

“We’ll see about that,” says Melanie as she enters the room and drops into her seat on Georgie’s other side. “Gimme the wheel, ghost-boy.” 

In a flat in central London, two full Avatars and three fear-marked sit in a living room and laugh at the darkness around them. Everything ends eventually, so why worry? For now, everything begins.

And in the center of all things, the Admiral profits.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> and the watcher's crown never happened and everything was fine and they all lived happily ever after the end
> 
> drop a comment if you're feeling up to it or come visit me on [tumblr](https://thepensword.tumblr.com)/[twitter](https://twitter.com/thepensw0rd)


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